2017/2018 JavaScript

There has been a lot of research on the landscape this year! Here are a few snippets from a bunch of articles. There is a ton of information in each, so I’m just picking out a few juicy quotes from each here.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is how different the data looked at is. Each of these is different: a big developer survey, npm data, GitHub data, and StackOverflow data. Yet, they mostly tell the same stories.

The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks

Ian Allen of StackOverflow writes:

JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more revolutionary) framework pops up to usurp the throne.

Using the Stack Overflow Trends tool and some of our internal traffic data, we decided to take a look at some of the more prominent UI frameworks: Angular, React, Vue.js, Backbone, Knockout, and Ember.

The Top JavaScript Trends to Watch in 2018

Ryan Chartrand of X-Team for Hackernoon writes:

This time last year, not many had faith that Vue would ever become a big competitor to React when it comes to major companies adopting it, but it was impossible to ignore Vue this year, even sending Angular a bit into the shadows in terms of developer hype.

The State of JavaScript Frameworks, 2017

This one is from Laurie Voss of npm, which is probably the best source of data for usage but faces interesting challenges with that data:

You can use npm’s download statistics to give you insight into the amount of people actively invested in using and maintaining a package. However, probably more important than absolute popularity is growth.

Packages, once incorporated into software, have very long lives. People very seldom rip packages out of software once they’re installed. Because of this very low “churn,” packages hardly ever decline in usage. Furthermore, nearly all packages in the npm Registry grow in usage as the number of total npm users continues to skyrocket. They vary only in how fast they’re growing.

This makes measuring growth harder, since measuring absolute growth in downloads all the time makes almost everything look popular.

All in all it tells a familiar story: React is incredibly popular and Vue is the one to watch.

Top JavaScript Libraries & Tech to Learn in 2018

Eric Elliott writes:

Vue.js did do very well in 2017. It got a lot of headlines and a lot of people got interested. As I predicted, it did not come close to unseating React, and I’m confident to predict it won’t unseat React in 2018, either. That said, it could overtake Angular in 2018.